The Stick Buckles

Mark's MailboxMarch 2, 2014

https://www.steynonline.com/6137/the-stick-buckles

I'm starting the week in Toronto, where I'll be dropping in on my comrade Ezra Levant's TV show and trial (which starts Monday morning at 10am). For a little bit of the background to the trial, see my National Post column. And, as soon as we've seen off Khurrum Awan, sole surviving Sock Puppet from our battles with the "human rights" commissions, I'll be back down south attending to Michael E Mann. On the subject of which, Tom McMorrow writes:

Mark, Keep up your good humor about the professor by employing a nice, twisted Harry Lauder stick. Who knows about the blade, but the "handle" of climate change looks more like Harry's support than Mann's hockey stick.

I hadn't thought about Sir Harry's famous walking stick (see picture) in years, so thanks for that - and setting me singing "Roaming In The Gloaming" for the rest of the day. I think I say somewhere in Mark Steyn's American Songbook that it was Harry Lauder who advised the infant Jule Styne to stop doing impressions and take piano lessons instead. Which means that indirectly we have Lauder to thank for "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" As to his application in the Mann case, I'm not sure how many people still know his name, but I believe "Harry Lauder's walking stick" has become a horticultural term.

From Harry Lauder to Harry Laughlin. David Sharp draws a parallel:

Hi Mark
I was recently reading Bill Bryson's latest book; " One Summer America, 1927" in which he explores some of the interesting thinks that happened in and around that year. Not sure if you are familiar with his work but in a way he reminds me of you - always interesting and well researched, often irreverent and funny. This book is a generally light hearted look at events that happened at that time. Where it doesn't get very light hearted is on the subject of Eugenics.

Like most people I have heard about this subject and I put it down as a belief of a few misguided cranks. Not a bit of it, I am now amazed at the number of highly intelligent and powerful people who believed such stuff, and to get a little more insight I started reading Edwin Black's War Against the Weak. It was all too much for me, pacing up and down doing my usual " how could all these people believe this sh*t" I had one of those 'light bulb' moments. Of course: It was Settled Science

So maybe it would have been better if you had named the Mann Child - the Harry H. Laughlin (Bryson calls him 'maybe the most lamentable person to achieve scientific respectability in America in the twentieth century') of Climate Science.

Actually, Dr Mann's scientific "respectability" is ever more tenuous. Apropos his false claims to have been "exonerated" by multiple British and American inquiries, Margaret piles on:

While not naming names, thisscathing assessment in the report by the UK Institute of Physics, commissioned by the House of Commons, does refer to scientists working in other countries as being just as culpable and deserving of the IOP's criticisms as the CRU scientists---and any reasonable person would expect that Mann would have to be included in that.

Indeed. Here's a couple of choice quotes:

The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

And:

The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

One more:

The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital.

Okay, another:

There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific 'self correction', which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself.

This is what the Institute of Physics thinks of Mann's "science".

On the other hand, things could still go really bad for me:

When the trial's over, tell Mann that you will knock a few bucks off what he owes you if he joins you in a duet of 'Marshmallow World'.

Gregory Speetzen

Over my dead body. "Baby, It's Cold Outside", maybe. Speaking of songs, our Song of the Week prompted this recommendation:

Mark;
After reading your article on Meredith Willson and The Music Man (one of my all-time favorite movies, as is the marvelous Robert Preston performance), here is amust-see video of Hugh Jackman on the Jay Leno show performing ALL EIGHT parts of the traveling salesmen talking about Professor Harold Hill to the 'clacking of the train.' Its brilliant and very entertaining; Jackman is one talented gent.

Finally, a word on perhaps the most moving and sobering story we've covered in the last week, the award of the Victoria Cross, posthumously, to its 100th Australian recipient:

I wept upon reading your obituary for Corporal Cameron Baird, VC.

Corporal Baird was a volunteer. He did what he did because he wanted to do it. He was not forced. And his country sent him to Afghanistan voluntarily. Australians, Canadians, Britons, and other allies of the United States did not have to respond to the 9/11 attacks by joining us in our fight, but they did. They showed themselves to be friends in need and friends indeed. They have my undying gratitude, and they are a vivid reminder of why the Anglophone tribes are the only ones with the capcity to save the world from itself.

Bill Dodson
Fullerton, California

~Drop Steyn a line on his lawsuits or anything else at Mark's Mailbox.